* Industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague might be best known to auto aficionados as the father of Walter Dorwin Teague Junior, Marmon Sixteen designer, but he also put forth a few of his own automotive ideas, including the first all-plastic truck, a Ford-based van pitched to UPS. Geoff Hacker at Forgotten Fiberglass has more on it.

* This past week the Simeone Museum revamped its website to now include profiles of the vehicles in the museum, plenty of photos, and more.

* Finally, in last week’s Four-Links, we discussed one one-off behind-the-Iron-Curtain sports car, and this week we came across another: the 1960 FSO Syrena Sport, aka the Polish Corvette. The sole built example was, according to Tim’s Car Talk, stashed away until the 1970s and then ordered destroyed by the Polish government.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design in Waitsfield, Vermont, on the cars designed by Walter Dorwin Teague Jr., to coincide with the museum’s current exhibit focusing on the work and life of Teague’s father, widely considered as the industrial designer who created the profession in the 1920s. While the majority of the presentation obviously focused on the Marmon Sixteen and the HCM Twelve, my research turned up one interesting concept that very well could have changed the course of automobile history in the United States: a Ford-based sports car in 1941.

To begin with, Walter Dorwin Teague Sr. wasn’t much of an automobile enthusiast. He didn’t own a car until 1926, and didn’t actually learn how to drive until 1950, so understandably, he didn’t actually design any cars himself. However, his son, who went by the name Dorwin, was a car guy – he subscribed to the automobile magazines of the day, and at age 16 drove a Chevrolet roadster across the country. At 19, he jumped on the opportunity to design the Marmon Sixteen, believing big cars was where it’s at, but not long after that he took a ride in a friend’s Amilcar and immediately became a fan of the lightweight European sports car. From Dorwin’s autobiography, Industrial Designer: The Artist as Engineer:

The Amilcar was a rather primitive little staggered two-seater with wire wheels, cycle fenders and a high-revving engine. This one was painted white and had no top but the weather was fine so we decided to visit some of the better country clubs along the North Shore of Long Island. Nassau and Suffolk counties were not yet developed. Jericho Turnpike and the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway were the main east-west routes which were narrow and winding, through beautiful country, just made for a sports car… We toured around for two days and I had a chance to find out what a joy it was to drive a car that handled so well… From that day on I was strictly a sports car buff and no longer had much use for big cars.

In fact, for the rest of his life, he owned and drove almost nothing but sports cars – a pair of SSIs, an Austin-Healey 100/4, a Bugatti T37, a couple of Porsche 356 Speedsters, a Porsche 356D, a Porsche 356SC, and a couple Porsche 911s – and for several years raced in the SCCA.

Meanwhile, Dorwin went to work in his father’s design agency, which by the late 1930s had acquired Ford as a client – not to design cars, rather to design Ford’s pavilion at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. The agency’s offices prominently displayed the model Dorwin had built that led to his design for the HCM Twelve, so when Edsel Ford visited the offices to go over the World’s Fair designs, he took an interest in the model and Dorwin’s ideas on cars of the future.

Edsel liked my ideas and asked if I would attend some of the national automobile shows and report back to him on my impressions and suggestions. Being paid to attend an automobile show was my idea of a good time.

Incidentally, at about the same time, Walter Dorwin Teague Sr. offered to expand the relationship with Ford by contributing automobile designs, but Edsel Ford politely declined. “We have a pretty good group here in Styling, and I do not want to rock the boat at this time,” he told Teague Sr. The fact that Edsel Ford was simultaneously engaging Dorwin to effectively act as a styling consultant and rejecting Teague Sr.’s proposal reveals how much more of a grasp Dorwin had on automobile design than his father.

Also, at about the same time, Edsel Ford ordered the Lincoln Continental into production, earning the admiration of many a contemporary designer and stylist, Dorwin included. So when it came time for Dorwin to report back to Edsel in November 1940, Dorwin combined his fondness of foreign sports cars and the Lincoln Continental to propose an American sports car. “The best way to go about it would be to bring out a special version of the Ford or Mercury, following the lead of the Lincoln Continental cabriolet, only smaller, lower and less expensive- sort of a family sports car,” he wrote.

Edsel agreed and asked me to work up an illustration of what I had in mind. In view of the enormous tooling cost of a completely new design, he suggested that I should employ as many existing body dies as possible. It didn’t take long to make some drawings and a rendering which turned out quite well, in spite of the use of current fender and hood dies (above). When he saw these he reversed his opinion and asked me to carry the idea further forgetting about the body die limitation. My air brush rendering retained much of the Lincoln Continental feeling and simplicity, but was lower and more compact, with fenders more like those I had used in the Marmon Twelve model. Edsel was extremely pleased with the result which was finished around the latter part of 1941.

We can only speculate whether Edsel Ford gave any serious thought to entering production with the proposal. By late 1941, with war materiel production ramping up, Ford was in no position to introduce a new model, and Edsel Ford died two years later.

But let’s say World War II hadn’t interrupted automobile production and that Edsel Ford took a serious shine to the concept. While it’s true that other American manufacturers offered four-seater convertibles at the time, Ford would have been able to produce a more affordable competitor (through shared body dies with existing Ford products), a more powerful competitor (through a slightly warmed-over flathead V-8), and a more stylish competitor (through Edsel Ford’s aesthetic guidance).

Sure, this is mere conjecture, but consider another sporting four-passenger Ford product of 20 years later that Ford built off an existing volume platform using a line of high-performance engines and attractive styling. The first Mustang, philosophically speaking, follows Dorwin’s concept of a family sports car. Whether Dorwin ever noted the similarity we don’t know – he never seemed to have written about the Mustang – and, of course, the success of the Mustang had just as much to do with how Lee Iaccoca marketed and positioned it as it did with the overall philosophy of the car, but we can’t help but wonder whether Dorwin Teague’s family sports car would have influenced American auto design the same way the Mustang did.

Wandering around the preview for RM Auctions’ sale in Monterey last month (like a beggar at $500 a plate banquet), I couldn’t help thinking I’d read about this blocky beige Marmon somewhere before.

As it turns out, the Marmon HCM special, was prominently featured in the August 1979 Special Interest Autos, and the car’s origins make for a fascinating story, but if you don’t have time to be quite that fascinated, here’s the Reader’s Digest version: Howard Marmon is said to have commissioned the HCM special to be built, at a cost of $160,000, during the waning days of his company. Powered by an overhead-valve aluminum V-12 engine, the HCM rode on independent coil spring front suspension and traverse-leaf independent rear suspension. With the Marmon company nearly out for the count, Marmon shopped the design around to other automakers, but there were no takers. He then took this prototype home and wrapped it in plastic. It wound up in a museum and then fell into the hands of its designer, Dorwin Teague, who had it restored to Pebble Beach-winning standards in 2001. Teague passed in 2004, leaving this commanding prototype as his legacy.

What’s interesting is that in 2007, the HCM sold at RM’s Meadow Brook auction for a whopping $891,000. Of course, that was prior to 2008 when the economy tanked, apparently taking with it the value of big beige Marmon prototypes. At RM’s Monterey sale last month, with the extremely nice restoration work holding up well after a decade, the car was tagged with an auction estimate between $800,000 and $1 million. So, not surprisingly, the consignor chose not to let the car go for the top bid of $475,000. The HCM is definitely weird, but like many concept cars, seeing it in person gives you an entirely different perspective about its lines and proportions.

For all the streamliners and teardroppers sketched out, put into clay and prototyped, very few successfully became the car of the future that they claimed to be. But they sure made for excellent copy for the newspapers and mechanics magazines of the day, and David Greenlees recently came across a small treasure trove of streamliners in press photographs, few of which have been seen until now. Fortunately, he knew these were right up our alley and forwarded them on to us.

First up, a retractable hardtop carthat we’ve seen here before, the Dan LaLee car , but in much better resolution than the grainy photos from three years ago. The photos all date from February 10, 1938, and depict LaLee, along with Jack Knight of United Air Lines and model Betty Bryant, showing off the retractable in or around Dearborn, Michigan. A couple of the photo descriptions include the word “rebuilt” and those wheels appear to come from an earlier Ford, so we can presume LaLee used a chassis from a wrecked car on which to base his retractable.

Next, a couple renderings from a couple of well-known designers. Raymond Loewy penned the first, dated January 1938, and described as “a model of the automobile of the future, with its engine in the rear.” The second comes from Walter Dorwin Teague, and was used around March 1940 to promote Teague’s book, Design This Way Day: The Technique of Order in the Machine Age. The rendering is described as “the rear-engined, teardrop car of tomorrow… designed by Mr. Teague and Walter Dorwin Teague, Jr., features clear vision, extra seating capacity, built-in bumpers and airflow form.”

The McQuay-Norris needs no introduction. These photos of it date from June 1935 and depict alongside of it George Leutwiler, test engineer for McQuay-Norris. The location could very well be St. Louis, where McQuay-Norris was based.

The next rendering, dated December 1933, came through without any information about the designer or the purpose of the design. However, the tadpole-configured model, dated March 1944, is credited to Frank Spring, who intended to combine “maximum streamlining with practical considerations.” Of course, everybody but Spring had designed their streamliners to be as impractical as possible…

Finally, a photo showing the back end of Edsel Ford’s 1932 speedster, dated January 1933. The reverse reads “back end of a future automobile.” If only.

Thanks, David!

Dan LaLee’s streamlined retractable hardtop

Dan LaLee’s streamlined retractable hardtop

Dan LaLee’s streamlined retractable hardtop

Dan LaLee’s streamlined retractable hardtop

Raymond Loewy streamliner rendering

Walter Teague streamliner rendering

McQuay-Norris

McQuay-Norris with George Leutwiler

unidentified streamliner

Frank Spring streamliner

Edsel Ford speedster

UPDATE: Added a couple more shots that David found, another of the Frank Spring tadpole, and one of the Alberto Gorgoni-designed rhomboid-type streamliner.